AXES

A series of questions mark the beginnings of any grass-root researcher : the "how" and the "why" of things; questions which normally translate a fresh starting in research activities generally under constraints of professional careers or academic courses needs. Much, however, adhere to it for affinities or convictions, just to find in R&D a way of expressing oneself. As Albert Einstein says in his book How I see the world, "research proceeds by distinct and durable moments, intuition, blindness, exaltation and fever. It leads one day to this joy, and knows this joy he who lived singular moments". Nietzsche confirms this when announcing that "Any research directed towards a better knowledge of ourselves and of the world, implies that we believe in the possibility of reaching an expression of ourselves nearer to our true nature". But it is also necessary to admit the limits of our potentials of analysis to understand the world and the natural laws which govern it. George Orwell expresses it in these terms "What constitutes the core of humans as  human being, is not to seek the perfection". The essential remains to have revoked the intellectual passivity and to have tried to push back as much as possible the limits on the "obscure side" of knowledge. In the worst of the cases, and according to the assertion of Saint Gregoire de Nyss, "To search is not a thing and to find another, but the profit of research, is research itself".

 

In any case, I would not say that I fell inside being young, it will be pure pretension. But I would say that my interest towards the foreign languages predicted already literary and linguistics school courses which I however intended to avoid. But, having been exposed to the language of Molière since my youth (10 years), then stimulated by French teachers (cooperates in Tunisia) during the secondary school, my interest for the languages was reinforced with the time going and culminated by choosing them as a university domain of study. Even converted later on with other disciplines like library sciences (Spain 1983-85) then with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) after a one year stay at Syracuse University, School of Information studies, USA (1989-1990), the linguistic aspects always remained transverse with my concerns for research.

 

The trigger was, however, enough original and unpredictable (see here)!

 

Digital cultural and linguistic diversity

It is by the means of this mixture between languages, technologies and information/communication, that I test research receipts (sometimes unusual!), but which always express research concerns which often emanates from the crossing of different disciplinary fields giving place sometimes to strange questionings like the directionality of figures in the electronic information processing systems (!). Indeed, one of the subjects of analysis always in filigree in my research activities, relates to the sources and the origins of the resemblance between the numerical decimal system in Arab language and that in German. It is the famous concept of the "Ein und Zwanzig". Why exclusively in German (by comparison with the other Latin and Germanic languages), one enumerates the value of figures ranging between 11 and 99, starting from the units towards the tens. It is the same mechanism as in literary and dialectal Arabic. This is a sociolinguistic research field which I am observing with expectations to catch the first signs of a sort of explanation. But, for the moment, and if I believe in the proverb of Martin du Guard, "the how interests me enough so that I give up without regret the vain research of the why".

 

The core of research on this axis is a thesis work which made it possible to define all the future ways of investigation and analysis about technical and cultural questions about Arab-Latin multilingualism. A specific interest is also granted to the international initiatives in the field of cultural and linguistic diversity, primarily those undertaken by UNESCO and essentially its two conventions : Convention on the protection and the promotion of the diversity of the cultural expressions (UNESCO, 2005), which comes to consolidate the universal Declaration of UNESCO on cultural diversity (UNESCO, 2001).

 

Man-machine multilingual interfaces: (Thesis subject)

It is a question of a concentration on the design and the evaluation of the Man-Machine Interfaces with a particular focus on the Arab-Latin context. The objective of this axis was to study the relevance of the data-processing solutions for coding the multilingual characters on the basis of the international standards of ISO, ASMO, ECMA, UNICODE... and of the extension solutions of coded character sets for the integration of the Arab language (like any other non Latin language) in the cyberspace. The two topics of internationalization (i18n) and the localization (l10n) of the Information and Communication systems and more particularly the applicative interfaces, constituted a great part of the elements studies. The situation is that today these two points still face linguistic and cultural obstacles not yet entirely solved by the developers. The case of the exclusive left to right directionality of the figures, even in a Multilingual Arabic master mode (!). This makes the treatment of the figures in the incidental clauses and breakings of the multilingual texts very complex for many Arabic-speaking users.

 

This research topic constitutes the principal set of themes treated in a thesis work entitled:

 

Morphology and architecture of the communication interfaces of scientific and technical information in a multilingual environment: the arabo-Latin context

  

How to cite this thesis	BEN  HENDA, Mokhtar Morphology and architecture of the communication interfaces of scientific and technical information in a multilingual environment: the arabo-Latin context [On line]. Information & Communication. Thesis of University. Bordeaux, France: University Michel de Montaigne, February 1, 1999, 390 p. Accessible on: http:// www.benhenda.com/publications/these/prelim.pdf
To download	Preliminaries 88 KB	Chap. 1 300 KB	Chap.2 260 KB	Chap.3 2,46 Mo	Chap. 4 2,39 Mo	Conclusion 39 KB	Bibliography 1,13 Mo	Appendices 246 KB

 

A digest of the ways of analysis in this thesis, is accessible here.

 

This research orientation was also the subject of a synthesis work (scientific report) presented to obtain the degree of Accreditation to Supervise Research (HDR) at the University of Manouba, TUNISIA. This work traces this research evolution through conferences and varied publications.

 

In fact, multilingualism constitutes the core of these research activities and defines a transverse criterion in all the later ramifications and openings which are brought to reinforce it. The two main extensions to the central topic of multilingualism are the multilingual metadata and the standardization of the pedagogical objects shared in the E-learning environments. 

 

Metadata

 

Being a basic component of all the communication and information systems, metadata figured out since my first years of training in library science and documentation, among my research interests. Two years of part time teaching of cataloguing and indexing at the Institut Supérieur de Documentation de Tunis, then my three year position as a manager of a specialized university library (ENA of Tunis), reinforced my apprehension of this essential element importance for information systems. Since my thesis achievement in 1999, the topic of the numerical indexing by multilingual metadata had become one of my research concern. It was when co-supervising a Master's degree in Information and communication at LVI laboratory of the University of Marseilles, that I proposed to a student to do a basic work to evaluate the impact of multilingual metadata elements, in free formats or Dublin Core standardized, on search engines spiders. A work of the same nature is under development to draft a more exhaustive and more representative work about the same topic.

 

It is particularly around the concepts of ontologies, terminology, standardized vocabularies and the structuring tools like Topic Maps, that the multilingual axis can join these initiatives of metadata standardization of the semantic networks, to make burst the Anglo-Saxon and Latin linguistic and cultural palisades made around these "reserved areas" and thus allow a better representation of the languages and cultures world widely. But, it is obvious that the stake does not stop with simple expression of good hopes. The world of standardization is very strewn with obstacles, stakes and interests of great gauges.

 

E-Learning

 

It is a research orientation resulting from the interest given to metadata which also fits in the field of distant learning as a specialized information and communication system. Several actors federate there to constitute a chaining where other axes of my scientific interests cross together, like information and communication networks, intelligent IST research systems on Internet, the development of digital contents of multilingual information etc. With these starting axes concerning particularly various aspects of information and communication, the pedagogic component gradually occupies a large part of my current scientific interests. The pedagogic way of action and the psycho cognitive interactions between learners within the Learning Management Systems (LMS) denote of interesting and innovative peculiarities inherent to the information and communication sciences. Tutoring, teaching accompaniment, synchronous/asynchronous communications, in-situ and distant teaching modes, auto-evaluation etc. are as many new concepts which emerge inside the borders of the university, the laboratory and the company. They contribute to explode the space borders which distinguish disciplines like Information and Communication from one side and sciences of education from another. University pedagogy today, with all its new theories of cognitivism, constructivism and socio-constructivism etc. are built primarily on the recourse and the use of the ITC. The new TICE concept is revealing this complementarity.

 

It was in 1999, through the DUTICE program (becoming later UTICEF), undertaken jointly by the AUF and the ULP of Strasbourg with the collaboration of the TECFA (Geneva), Mons University (Belgium), ISD (Tunis) and Polytechnic School (Dakar), that I could start experiencing  E-Learning initially as content developer, then as tutor.

 

TRANSFER workshops of AUF made it possible for me to look further into certain key concepts of E-learning which the most recent is   undoubtedly standardization. 

 

Standardization and E-Learning

 

Distant learning knows a generalized world effervescence due to the strategic, economic and technological values it induces. It has become for a few years a mode phenomenon which was gradually transformed into a strategic need which accompanies the world LMD (License, Master, Doctorate) educational reform. A proliferation of technological turn-key solutions invaded the market of education and training. Integrating a great number of traditional and new actors, these solutions bring a great multitude of solutions to organize tools, information and communication in new methods appropriate for the new educational devices. This automatically implies a degree of resources sharing and collaborative work on multiple scales. However, in front of the diverse solutions proposed, many aspects of incompatibility are always observed during exchange and collaboration processes. This helps emerge once again the need to resort to interoperability standards which formerly marked the world of the traditional libraries and the on-line public catalogues (OPAC). Standards are nowadays marking out the world of E-Learning and cover many of its aspects. The metadata constitute a key element in this standardization describing actors, contents and teaching processes. Metadata schemas are developed on basis of old models, resulting from the documentary practices like Dublin Core. More detailed and more complete specifications were born, like the LOM (Learning Object Metadata), SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), IMS (Instructional Management System) to control and trace, besides the teaching contents, all forms of activities (roles, events, processes) concerning learners and their pedagogic scenarios.

 

This proliferation of standards implied a strong need to define a unique international standard for E-Learning. ISO (the World Organization of Standardization), the single entitled structure to define international standards, is leaning since 1999, on the study of a draft standard of metadata for the learning resources (MLR: Metadata for Learning Resources) which translates and synthesizes the existing specifications for exchange and interoperability objectives. Subcommittee 36 (SC36) of the joint technical committee number one (JTC1) of ISO and the International Electro technical Commission (ISO-IEC JTC1 SC36) operates in working groups (WG) which covers axes like the vocabulary (WG1) and metadata (WG4). All agree to set up a standardized device for E-Learning where metadata play a key role. Those cannot be excluded considering their important and strategic implication defining concepts like Ontologies and Topic maps. These are the semantic schemas which define the key concepts in a field of specialty and the semantic relationships which characterize the hierarchies which link them.

 

My experiment in this field is enriched by a contribution to the work of SC36 through the AUF delegation acting as a connecting member category A.

 

Information and communication networks

 

I caught the virus of local area networks in the laboratories (clusters) of Syracuse University, USA in 1989-90. The use of the e-mails on Internet (since 1989!) made me discover the considerable advantages of the broad connectivity. It was later in Tunisia that I could use videotext network owing to DIDON, the Tunisian data network, and the telecommunication services of IRSIT.

 

In Bordeaux (since 1994), I could look further into my Internet performances. Since then, I reserved a particular interest to the design and the use of Web sites; to search engines and intelligent agents accessing and diffusing IST.

 

Without constituting a research orientation in itself, LAN administration is a very interesting and strategic area to deal with. It is the inevitable vault to circumvent to be able to develop automated information products and systems and to lead projects of E-learning implementations. In our academic world, still in search of better perspectives when compared with the world of companies, the Intranets would constitute an important teaching alternative for teaching and research. It is to some extent "the solution of the poor" faced with the relatively colossal requirements of the broad distance networks .

 

Brought back onto the field of multilingualism, the information networks are one of the strategic vectors of internationalization and globalization. Beyond purely technical and technological considerations, networks challenged me to concentrate on their informational contents and cultural and linguistics values. Information contents are today one of the most essential polemics treated in the North-South relationships, in the strategies of durable development and in the aid to development programs. The multilingual aspect of digital information contents evokes a very sharp debate on Internet. Like Bernard CASSEN specifies it (Le Monde, Manière de Voir, October 1996), "the totally English is no more a fate". It is beautiful to hear but it remains to define of which side of the world one considers this assertion. Minority languages, dominant languages... mercury is not stabilized yet.

 

 

Development Aid Programs

 

I modestly began research at the University of Syracuse in the USA in a research axis typical to the Nineties: technology transfer and information resources affordability from the North to the South. I contributed with Marta DOSA, from School of Information Studies at Syracuse University,  formulating a project oriented towards restoration of educational program of information sciences in 10 developing Countries. It was a project carried out within the framework of the technical committee of FID (FID/ET).

 

I was also interested in privatization of information services and resources in the developing countries. A synthesis work was carried out in this respect under the supervision of Marta Dosa. A summary of this work was published in the bulletin of the FID (Newsletter on Education and Training Programs for Information Personnel. Vol.12; n°3, Autumn 1990).

 

The field of the durable development and the national information policies continue to have their importance in the openings of my initial research orientations where the linguistic stake plays a principal role. Africa remains, in this respect, the favorable ground to consider more concerns about linguistic, cultural and technological risks in the national or international developing programs.

AFFILIATIONS

The mobility in my professional experiences of teaching and research activities are behind a substantial change of memberships within research structures and units. Currently (2006/2007), my research activities are primarily subscribed in the working activities of of two research structures identified in the following table: